Volume one of two on which
the Argentinean Lutenist plays the music of J. S. Bach. This 96 kHz recording
was produced in October, 1999, over a period of three days in the Cathedral
of the Convento Dell`Annunziata, Rovato, situated on a mountain overlooking
an immense valley in the district of Brescia, Italia. The atmosphere there is
amazing and when we weren't recording or having espresso in the town below,
we were enjoying the company of the priests with which we ate our two main meals.

MA would like to thank Maestro Marco Mencoboni whose role as musical director
was invaluable for the success of the project. MA would also like to thank Paolo
and Ricardo Mencoboni as well. Marco Mencoboni and his brothers have their own
label called: E lucevan le Stelle and while they have not set up their
own web site, we strongly recommend their recordings which are also recorded
with one pair of high voltage Bruel and Kjaer microphones in churches and other
large spaces in Italia. You can email Marco at mmencob@tin.it
for more information. Be sure to tell him you heard about E lucevan le Stelle
from MA!

250 Years of Life after Death

translation from the Spanish: Betina Rodriguez Fos

July
28th 1750, after having lived 65 five years, Johanna Sebastian Bach dies in
Leipzig, without leaving any will. The last heir of a tradition which had started
more than two hundred years before, J. S. Bach, a passionate Lutheran, who rarely
showed himself to the Europa Galante, had left an invaluable artistic heritage
which was divided shortly after his death. His two eldest sons Wilhem Friedmann
and Carl Phillip Emanuel equally distributed books of music, music scores and
manuscripts, while the rest of the inheritance was subdivided on the 11th of
November of that same year, in line with a preexisting inventory.

The great bulk of copies and autographs
which had been craftily produced within a real "family laboratory" (both Anna
Magdalena Bach and close and distant relatives had worked intimately with the
"pater familias") were maintained for a considerable time by the brothers
and although Carl Phillip Emanuel's inheritance was kept almost undamaged, the
part kept by "Bach de Halle" did not survive to the same degree. The somewhat
eccentric personality Wilhem Friedmann had, drove him to part with many of the
manuscripts, be it for singular generosity to his students and friends, or later
for economic reasons. This is why the autograph of the first book of Das Wohitemperierte
Klavier or the Klavierbüchlein that Johann Sebastian had prepared for Wilhem,
to name just some cases, went to "'Other hands", many of them famous collectors.

Very different was, on the other
hand, the fate of the inheritance that Carl Phillip Emanuel received. The catalogue
published in Hamburg in 1790 by Gottlieb Friedrich Schniebes (Verzeichniss des
musikalischen Nachlasses Des vestorbenen Capellmeisters Carl Phillip Emanuel
Bach) is a testimony to the abundant bulk which the musician had fervently conserved
until his death, After being in hands of relevant figures of the times, Abraham
Mendelssohn Bartholdy (Felix's father), Carl Friedrich Zelter (Founder of the
Berliner Singakademie and Goethe's friend), Georg Pölchau, Princess Anne
Amelia of Prussia (sister of Frederic The Great and Kimberger's student) among
many others, the manuscripts were finally handed over to the Königliche
Bibliothek in Berlin.

It is difficult to risk establishing
the reasons why, after Johann Sebastian's death, both the figure of the genius
and his music did not enjoy the privilege which we would have desired today.
With the change of generation, the gallant aesthetic of the moment was oriented
more to a philosophy like the one which would later give birth to Sturm und
Drang rather than to the complicated Stilo Antico of Bach's. During his life,
comments, controversy and arguments demonstrated a significantly divided opinion
among his contemporaries who tended to consider him an excellently- improvised
technician in counterpoint, virtuous in keyboard playing and improvisation,
but at the same time skillful, anti-natural and reactionary to a quite predominant
style to which he did not even belong to. The indifferent commentary which Johann
Matheson gave in Das beschützte Orchestre (Hamburg, 1717) "I have seen
from Weimar"s famous organist, Mr. J. S. Bach, things which both for the church
and for keyboard instruments have been conceived in such a way that his person
should be highly considered", or Birnbaum's defense in Bach's favour against
Scheibe's sayings, are just some examples of the conceptually different critical
apparatus to the one of our times; comprehensible may be from an appropriate
hermeneutic approach.

Even though it seems impossible,
within the fifty years of history which separate Bach's death from the beginning
of the dazzling XIX century, a tremendous number of works belonging to the monumental
bulk of manuscripts were published: a prelude, a series of fugues, a chorale
and an organ sonata, apart from scanty pieces collected from some essays. Nevertheless,
in some areas a slow Renaissance of Bach's art was awakening. A new taste for
the antique, an interest for small and large treasures of the past, which Romanticism
was starting to inherit from the Enlightenment; rationalism encouraged among
other things the collection of musical manuscripts, mainly those of the Kanto.
Biographies, dictionaries with important sections dedicated to Bach and History
books (the famous Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik by Forkel, in which he is
compared to Ockeghem) enriched the musical world, while catalogues from famous
publishing houses in Leipzig, Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna offered a conspicuous
number of manuscripts in the market. On the other hand the Thomasschule, especially
with the figure of Christian Friedrich Penzel, helped to preserve the tradition
of its previous Thomaskantor's church music.

During this time the figure of
the Austrian baron Gottfried Bernhard van Swieten had a decisive role in the
total recovery of Bach's music. As a diplomat, van Swieten visited Berlin in
1770 and there, frequenting Frederick II's court, he received lessons from Marpurg
and Kirnberger and became immensely interested in Carl Phillip Emanuel's music.
He wrote in a diplomatic letter: "Among other things he (Frederick II) speaks
to me of music and of a great organ player named Bach, who stayed during for
a while in Berlin. This artist is gifted with tremendous talent, superior to
what I have ever heard or imagined, in reference to depth of harmonic knowledge
and strength of performance. Nevertheless, those that knew his father believe
that his son is still no equal; the king agrees with this and to prove it, a
person sings to me of a chromatic fugue which he had given to old Bach and in
front of him he improvised a fugue in 3, then in 4 and finally in 6 obbligatto
voice".

When he finished his diplomatic
mission, van Swieten, who felt great admiration for Johann Sebastian Bach, returned
to Vienna where he devoted himself to the organization of periodical musical
encounters generally frequented by the local nobility. One of the visitors in
these "polyphonic" meetings was young Mozart, whose musical compositions began
to reflect the influence of both Bach's and Händel's strict counterpoint.
The fact that the Viennese world was invaded by a strong taste for strict polyphony
allowed, not only Mozart but also other musicians to get interested in Bach's
technique through compositions, arrangements or complex fugue transcriptions:
Beethoven himself transcribed for a quintet of bows the fugue 22 of Das Wohltemperierte
Wavier. Haydn, on the other hand, acquired some manuscripts, among them the
"mass in C minor" (BWV 232) from an unknown copyist.

The beginning of the Ottocento
surprises us with a monograph on Bach's life and work by the famous author Johann
Nikolaus Forkel (with an inscription to baron van Sweiten) and almost contemporary
the edition of Das Wohltemperierte Klavier published by Nägeli in Zurich
and Simrock in Bonn which definitely opened the way to many other publishing
enterprises. Publications on one side and concert activities on the other (the
famous Matthäus-Passion of March 10th 1829 conducted by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy),
reached their highest point with the creation of a Bach-Gesellschaft, just in
the middle of the XIX century. This society published Bach's "omnia" opera,
based on existing music; a tremendous work which took it more than half a century
to complete. In a parallel way and following Forkel's tradition, two great masterpieces
also contributed to the biographic study of the Kantor: "Johann Sebastian Bach"
(Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig, 1873/1879) by Phillip Spitta and "J.
S. Bach, le musician poète" (Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig, 1905)
by Albert Schweitzer.

Neue Bachgesellschaft's creation
on January 27th 1900, apart from marking the beginning of the XX century, meant
that BACH'S name was changing to another stage in its evolution. It not only
greatly increased the research on the life and work of the German genius but
it also started with the organization of annual events called Bachfeste, created
the Bach Jarbuch, concentrated in publishing research on the musician and his
world and encouraged the activity in the Bachhaus in Eisenach, his home town.

When nothing more could be thought
of, Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig unexpectedly published in 1959 a
thematic catalogue of the composer's world: Thematischsystematisches Verzeichnis
der musikalischen Werke von Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV),
directed by Wolfgang Schemer and curiously not alongside with the Neue Bachgesellscaft's
activities. Schieder's catalogue, the research made and published by Alfred
Durr, Wilhem Werker and Werner Neumann, contemporarily to the new methodologies
of investigation related to a modem philology helped the creation of a new organization,
the Neue Bach Ausgabe Sämtlicher Werke, which foresaw the problem of elaborating
a new and definite chronology of Bach's output and a new edition which would
include not only the music but also a philological and detailed research of
his works. The machinery started working in 1955 with the publishing of a first
volume accompanied by a critical research paper, (Kritischer Bericht) and in
that way the publications were introduced successively until the end of the
1970's. The tremendous work of this society is, even today, an authorized reference.

The last fifty years of the XX
century witnessed excessive multiplication in regards to editions, transcriptions,
articles, essays, treaties, concertos, records and the like. In part due to
the retrospective boom of a whole purist current dedicated to recreate early
music, taking into account the concepts of originality and authenticity and
in part due to the proliferation of modern communication media.

If the music of the "integral serialism"
was proud of a strong interpretative "univocity", Bach's music on the other
hand resisted the most heterogenic interpretations, a situation which perhaps
no other composer has ever survived so victoriously

The year 2000 commemorates two
hundred and fifty years of HIS story: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Life After
Death.

The familiarity between Johann
Sebastian Bach and the lute adds up to a series of queries that two hundred
and fifty years have not yet found an answer to. In spite of the critical apparatus
which goes from the edition of the Neue Bach Ausgabe up to the modem computer
based arguments, passing through articles by famous investigators such as H.
Neemann, W. Tappert, H. Radke, H.J. Schulze, among others, the problem remains
in the speculative supposition domain. The principal issue which gives rise
to the investigation is that we do not know to this day, of "a" lute, with a
determined tuning, with which the whole lute corpus could be interpreted in
the pre-established keys.

Thanks to abundant documents, we
know that between the Kantor and the lute players of his world - J. C. Weyrauch,
J. L. Krebs, R. Straube, J. C. Gleditsch, J. Kropffgangs, or the famous S. L.
Weiss - the relationship was close; we know that a pair of lutes owned by Bach
were included in his inventory and we also know of his relationship with the
Lautenwerk (keyboard instrument with gut strings) backing up the theory that
his lute works were originally conceived for this instrument.

Nevertheless, these considerations,
together with another great quantity (deserving much detailed research) do not
allow us to conclude that Bach definitely played the lute, and if so, to what
degree of proficiency, that he gave lessons (as commonly thought) and that his
works were "originally" written for a specific type of lute, or that they are
adaptations of his works composed for other instruments.

The music in this recording was
transcribed for lute from the following manuscripts:

-School of Arts and musical Sciences
of the Catholic University of Argentina (composition).

-Hopkinson Smith, Schola Cantorum
Basiliensis (lute diploma,1995).

Currently one of the principal representatives of the new generation of lute
players.

Has given numerous concerts as a soloist
in Austria, Argentina, Chile, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, Uruguay, etc with excellent reviews from knowledgable critics and a warm reception by the
public.

After graduating in Switzerland he moved
to Italy, expanding his expertise into the field of early music. Congruently,
his current performances are oriented towards characteristic repertoires of
major instruments such as the baroque lute, the theorbo, the vihuela and the
baroque guitar.

In our efforts to make for a more colorful sonic and musical experience, MA Recordings introduces the"Emerald Audiophile Series". It is well known among concerned audiophiles that light refractions of the optical laser thru the polycarbonate universally used in compact discs can make for a less than accurate reading of the digital musical content.

MA's "Emerald Audiophile Series" discs are actually made with a dark green polycarbonate, to help alleviate the potential problems associated with internal light refraction and enable a more accurate reading of the digital data from the optical disc, delivering the music with more finesse, and ultimately the original intention of the performer(s) and producer.

*Until further notice, as we gradually switch to this new color format, titles available in our "Emerald Audiophile Series"will no longer be available in clear polycarbonate. To reflect additional costs in producing these discs, an increase of $1.00 per disc on the MA site goes into effect immediately.